Updike keeps making new generations of fans

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Author John Updike, who turned 69 in March, keeps talking about slowing down. But the books keep coming, to the delight of his readers, and another one is in his sights now.

"I'm trying to get a novel rolling," Updike said after a recent reading at the University of Missouri-Columbia. "It hasn't gotten rolling yet, but hope springs eternal and I'd love to turn in a novel by the end of the year. That deadline may be optimistic but that's what I'm thinking now."

Updike, author of more than 50 books, is rarely at a loss for words, so keep that next novel in mind for sometime in 2002. Meanwhile, this month brings "Americana and Other Poems," the author's first collection of verse since his "Collected Poems" was issued in 1993.

Updike's reading reminded once again that his authorial range is probably without peer in contemporary American literature. In addition to his novels, short fiction and poems, he has produced essays, memoirs, criticism. He has won seemingly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize.

The Q-and-A session with his Missouri audience included a young mother's praise of his recently updated "A Child's Calendar," first published in 1965 as the third of his five children's books. Another questioner wanted to know whether Updike had found spiritual solace in golf. Of course the question itself was a setup, a softball lob to get the author to expound on the ancient game he lovingly wrote about in "Golf Dreams."

Still another query involved why Updike gave up ambitions of cartooning for writing -- although he never really gave up art completely; he did write about his appreciation of it in "Just Looking."

"Like a lot of these alleged choices, it chose me," Updike said of the writing-not-cartooning query. Being a cartoonist, his first ambition "other than being a test pilot," fell by the wayside as his learning progressed and his literary talents developed.

"I was destroyed by my education," Updike said with a smile to the crowd well-stocked with students and academics.

The age range of Updike fans is remarkable: How many other American authors appeal to college freshmen, twentysomethings, the middle-aged and those, like Updike himself, who can identify with one of the newer poems he read, "Upon Becoming a Senior Citizen"?

That poem is emblematic of Updike's artistic stamina. Dated March 18, 1997, the day he turned 65, this "Senior Citizen" eschews complaints and aches in favor of 26 lines that evoke the arc of a life from Pennsylvania boyhood to New England writer who, like all of us, can never recapture lost years except in words, dreams, memory. Updike recalls his poor but happy family life, his grandfather's gift to him of a dollar bill, and concludes:

"We hug those first years and their guardians

so close to spite the years that took away

the days of trolley cars, coal furnaces,

leaf fires, knickers and love from above."

Much of Updike's reading struck tones elegiac, nostalgic, loving. Most of his poetry selections and the short story he chose to read evoked children, family life, fatherly and grandfatherly matters.

It was a reading some of Updike's critics should have heard. He has written beautifully of women and men, and in the 1960s and '70s he wrote, shockingly at times, of carnality and infidelity in titles such as "Couples" and "Rabbit Redux." But he is no arrested adolescent in a grandpa's body. Recent works evince a writer accepting, even celebrating, one of the last truths humans must embrace: Time on earth is finite.

"How Was It Really?" -- a story from last year's "Licks of Love" collection -- chronicles an aging man, Don Fairbairn, and his bemused recollections of coupling and child-rearing.

Humorous on the page, it was hilarious rendered aloud via Updike's deadpan delivery. Of lines such as, "The beds, how had they got made, and the meals, how had they got onto the table for 22 years? Alissa must have done it all, somehow, while he was reading the sports page."

Not true, of course; never trust an author. One suspects that character and creator, Don and John, both did their share of odd jobs and made their share of mistakes. Don's marriage to Alissa doesn't last; both eventually looked "outside the home for strength to keep the home going."

Yet, Updike's families, flawed as they are, do last for us. Ultimately, perhaps, the author's tales of familial striving anchor his fiction and keep us interested.

"[This is] a story for the elderly, really," Updike said as he introduced "How Was It, Really?" "Anyone under 60 might want to seize this opportunity to leave."